I know this thread has been posted before but that was before the series of new patches to fix your arcana launch.

I felt as if you would address dragons being so worthless and over nerfed for sure but it turns out you didn't.

I would first like to state dragons are completely worthless in battle. We will just cut straight to the royal dragon since he takes up the most army space and is supposed to be 1 of the strongest dragons (units for that matter) in the game. The Royal dragon with high lvl is completely useless his abilities barely do any damage and if any unit gets near him they rip him apart. The dragon dies so fast to archers and infantry and cost so much more than regular units to have in your army that its not worth the space.

So I would like to know why you the devs think your changes to the dragons are good ones, why you believe making the units so much weaker but leaving its army space the same was a good idea, and basically why you think the dragons as they are now are not useless and are balanced properly.

P.S stating a unit was too powerful before is not a justification as to why the unit was made completely useless. Its fine to rebalance a unit to serve a new role, but to make an iconic unit that takes up so much space have no value to the player using it is not a proper balance.

Konstantin Fomenko

01-28-2014, 07:03 PM

Dragons are rather useless in a head-on battle I agree, but Dragons are also very exploitable - even now after all the nurfs. From taking out Wizards, to destroying town gates, to setting entire area around players walls on fire, and so much more.
And yes - I agree we should revisit the Dragon balancing sometime soon. However keep in mind the unit was design as a hit and run unit, and not a tank unit.

GamerGuy

01-28-2014, 09:22 PM

I understand what your saying and I agree the dragons were too powerful before. But the age of the dragon has definitely passed and they are far too weak now.

If they are to be hit and run then perhaps they should be reworked from the ground up because I don't think they were originally made to do hit and run very well and now without their defensive abilities they die extremely fast.

My point I guess is that they were/still are? 180 crowns for a royal dragon, and the royal dragons fire no long wipes out entire groups of enemies, and they take up a lot of army space. It takes many repeated castings from the dragon hitting the same group of targets to score any kills making it nearly useless in pvp. I had 2 High lvl royal dragons in a siege on Denwall both fire 3 fire balls from each dragon and I could barely take out 1 unit of lvl 7 archers on the wall.

Id say make the dragons more maneuverable for example give them the ability to stay in flight and move around at high speed. Much like when elves go invisible for example it drains mana/second. So a dragon could stay in flight and lose say 5-10 mana per second and be immune from ground attacks and take reduced archer damage and gain the ability to use dragon fire while moving so it would be more like a dragon where it flys by and breaths fire down on troops.

so losing 10 mana per second and maybe while in flight all the dragons abilities cost 50% more mana to cast (or not the abilities are already pretty weak and require multiple castings to do any real damage). So this makes the dragon more of a hit and run caster as you want it to be but less of a stationary waste of space as it is now. I mean right now the dragon is basically just cavalry meat. Enemy cavalry just charge it and tear it apart.

If the dragon is losing 5-10 mana per second plus casting a fire breath costs 200-250 mana you figure you have about 30 seconds of flight time and one casting of firebreath before you have blown all your mana. The trade off is you get to use your abilities less but you gain more defence and evasion and are less likely to be caught by horses or archers.

You would have to tweak mana per second, ability cost, ability damage but all in all the flight animations are already in place and the abilities are there so it might be an easy change. Its just right now it takes way to long for the dragon to lift off the ground and begin flying so once caught by any enemy unit the dragon can easily be killed before it can get away. And when I say once caught its pretty darn easy to get caught even when your alert and/or already running away.
The royal dragons are barely fast enough to get away from horses if at all, and the smaller dragons are much slower and just waiting to die.

Mr. Abysmalyxia

01-28-2014, 09:45 PM

GamerGuy's suggestion is a good one.

However, if you did incorporate this I would remove the trebuchet like fireball and instead just have a single ability called "Firebreath" that duplicated Firewall and that dragons could use in the air or on the ground to spew fire about the place.

Konstantin Fomenko

01-29-2014, 10:55 AM

I think you`ll like what we are doing with Dragons in the next patch.

rbfloat05

01-31-2014, 05:11 AM

yes buff dragons please I think they are verylackluster as well for such a majestic creature.

they shouldbe most powerful in the game

Langor

01-31-2014, 08:07 AM

yes buff dragons please I think they are verylackluster as well for such a majestic creature.

they shouldbe most powerful in the game

I am going to have to completely disagree with that last part. Dragons SHOULD NOT be the most powerful unit in the game. When you make a unit stronger than all other units you are forcing players to play with this unit. Now all strategies have to be created evolving around this unit because it is a required unit to be competitive. And what's worse is, now you have a generic game with cookie cutter strategies and army builds.

If EVERYONE wanted a "most powerful" unit in the game, they already have had the perfect candidate for that since launch. And for the sake of argument about dragons, who always kills the dragon? The hero. Not only in most games you are the hero that sooner or later becomes the strongest, there is only one of you.

So speaking on terms of balance, Heroes should be the strongest unit of the game (if DEVs wanted a strongest unit). Everyone STARTS with one. Everyone can only have one. And this would not dumb down the game with only one strategy as you could only have ONE between your 10 armies and city defense.

Anyways I am rambling on. So I look forward to seeing what they are doing with Dragons since between the five dragons they have basically (lightly speaking) all the same stats which generically decreases dependent on strength and population cost (Other than the range on their generic active abilities).

He is right on the money for sure. If you make one unit the strongest its a balancing nightmare. Another great write up langor!

rbfloat05

01-31-2014, 04:54 PM

okay i can see where making them the "most" powerful everyone would want one and that would be dumb.

but mayb give them a slight buff sligthly stronger? they just feel rather on the weaker side right now and take up a huge amount of space.

level 20 regular soldiers slaughter dragons like nothing

but very true cant make them too overpowerd

Gildorn

02-02-2014, 05:54 PM

Speaking as someone who has fought a dragon that was level 44.....they are not by any means WEAK.

Their fire does lingering damage which can be a massive problem for infantry as the dragon if properly used can spread fire and then fly off leaving your men to burn while it skitters off.

Really if you let a dragon get pinned down (or in one terrible case for me my Royal just STOPPED obeying orders and stood there to get butchered) it's your own fault that it gets slaughtered.

Dragons take a bit of skill to use I'm seeing, I've fought so far only a handful of PvPs where the enemy had dragons and it didn't glitch out on me. A few were easily destroyed because they just sat there and ate the damage.

But I also lost several matches because the dragons kept on moving and leaving my poor guys to slowly cook in their own juices lol

gorgos96

02-04-2014, 07:08 AM

dragon is for the damage hydra is the tank

HenderingHand

02-04-2014, 10:27 AM

A ton of people have already talked about this issue already so I will just say my piece:

Dragons (in most games such as this) are usually game breakers. In reality, if there were dragons in this time period they would destroy everything. The point I am trying to make is this: Dragons will always be difficult to balance. Either too strong or too weak. I think each dragon should be reworked for different uses. One dragon can be glass cannon, another tank, and another as the evasive mana eater. Allow them to be the masters of one form of power while severely lacking in other areas. It also makes sense to be allowed one dragon in each army. While all dragons can be held at home (for the achievement). The biggest issue is how exploitable the dragons can be, if they are allowed strength in one fighting style while weak in other styles, this will give the player a choice in the kind of dragon they want.

Glass Cannon: May go down quickly but can also destroy buildings/units/ etc as well.
Tank: May not destroy quickly but can act as a damage sponge for your other units.
Evader: May have low HP & low Damage, but can evade damage and poke the defending fortress.

gorgos96

02-04-2014, 01:36 PM

there is the hydra dragon to tank and glass cannon is the royal dragon